Care4Calais
April 2023
I travelled to Calais with NEU teachers from Warwickshire to volunteer in the refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk, France. I was the photographer in the group and documented the volunteer’s experience and the resilience of the refugees. Meeting some of the individuals that had experienced events I, or anybody from Western Europe could only imagine to experience, was eye opening to me and the people I travelled with. Personally I knew the position they were in, where they’d come from and what had happened in their home countries. But meeting these astonishing people that had lost so much, forced me to review my life and what we all take for granted day to day in the UK and other countries around the world.
A lot of the men are my age, between 17 - 21. They had walked from Afghanistan, Sudan and other countries to the north of France in Calais and Dunkirk. This is unimaginable to me and I have an incredible amount of respect for these people, and to photograph them was more than a privilege. During my time in Calais and Dunkirk, I wanted to document the work the volunteer’s and organisers put into helping these people, and photograph the human spirit in hard times which is often overlooked and ultimately make people think about what’s going on outside their own lives.
The LWS series
April 2021
I wanted to show what people were going through in a town that is assumed to be middle class. This series is important to me and I hope it’s important to you. I want people to actually look at the clients without having assumptions about them, having a mindset that thinks straight away how as a society we can help. The best way for me to tell this story is through photography, the photographer that was most inspiring for me was Dorothea Lange who documented the great depression in America during the 1930s. I wanted to learn how to approach people in a non patronising way in order to create a powerful image that tells a story. Something that I perhaps wouldn’t have had the courage to do a year ago.
